Arizona State University Library’s first Indigenous land acknowledgement is a five-sentence, 116-word statement about the place that the library and the university have inhabited for more than a century.
Under the direction of Lorrie McAllister, associate university librarian for collections and strategy, the statement was crafted by graduate students Alex Soto and Brave Heart Sanchez, with input from Jacob Moore, associate vice president of tribal relations at ASU; Joyce Martin, associate librarian and head of the library’s social sciences division who led the Labriola Center for more than 12 years; and other key faculty and staff stakeholders.
Soto, an operations supervisor who manages the Labriola Center on the West campus, says the land statement does a good job of recognizing where we are as a university library, both figuratively and literally, and can serve as a launch pad for deeper conversations about how the ASU Library might integrate and prioritize Indigenous knowledge systems.